9/11 by Jason Burke and Countering Al-Qaeda in London by Robert Lambert: review

In the decade since 9/11, the war on terror has been fought at great cost in
almost every corner of the globe. Peter Oborne examines the mistakes
we’ve made – at home and abroad – and asks how we can ensure they don’t
happen again, reviewing 9/11 by Jason Burke, and Countering Al-Qaeda in
London by Robert Lambert.

Osama bin Laden’s destruction of the Twin Towers set in motion a series of wars that have dominated the opening years of the 21st century, and set Britain and the United States at odds with large parts of the Islamic world. These two very different books grapple with the bin Laden legacy.

Jason Burke is well qualified to write about what he calls the 9/11 wars. He is already the author of an admirable book about al-Qaeda and as a reporter for the Observer witnessed many of the events he describes at first hand. His main focus is on the big set-piece events, above all the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the recent chaos in Pakistan. He writes from the ground up, and never forgets that the worst losers from the warfare of the last decade have been the hundreds of thousands of innocent people blown up by al-Qaeda suicide missions or US bombs.

Burke’s argument is refreshingly optimistic. He argues that there have been moments during the past 10 years when al-Qaeda looked like winning, in particular in 2005 and 2006 when the US had lost control in Iraq and suicide bombers were starting to strike Western cities with disturbing regularity. Since then, he suggests the US has regained the upper hand, while this year’s Arab Spring suggests events may have taken a trajectory completely different from the one hoped for by al-Qaeda. Burke says that there is “nothing to indicate an imminent global conflagration as had once been feared”.

Indeed, he suggests that al-Qaeda, 10 years after the calamity of 9/11, may now be on its last legs. The organisation’s brutality and bloodshed has inspired revulsion even in those countries, such as Iraq, where it claimed to be the voice of the local Muslim population in their struggle against the West. It is worth quoting from Burke’s well-informed assessment at length:

“Jihadi internet forums often featured comments recognising that no major attack had successfully been executed by al-Qaeda in the West for many years. The deaths of two senior Iraqi al-Qaeda leaders in a joint operation of American and Iraqi forces near Tikrit in April 2010 provoked an extraordinary outburst of criticism directed at the senior leadership. ‘Al-Qaeda’s media wing is lying and spreading false information. Everyone is tired of al-Qaeda’s stupidity,’ argued one user of a known jihadist forum. In the ultra-competitive world of militancy, the risk for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri was of being consigned to the role of pioneers whose best work was behind them.”

Coming from such an experienced observer, this is heartening. Burke also argues that Western democracies have shown great resilience and strength, and the US has not been fundamentally weakened by its enormous expenditure of blood and money over the past 10 years. This conclusion is admirably bold and may yet be shown to be wrong. Historians may come to judge that the first decade of the 21st century turned out to the climacteric of the American empire.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US was the undisputed global hegemon, with no conceivable challenger in sight. This is by no means the case today. It is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy (Burke pays surprisingly little attention to the financing of the 9/11 wars) and globally it appears hopelessly overstretched. The US may boast the most formidable military force the world has ever known, but one lesson of the 9/11 wars is that this superbly well-equipped army is incapable even of subduing a handful of tribesmen in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, Burke only gives the most cursory attention to the two big winners of the 9/11 wars. The first of these is China, which has stealthily gained in economic muscle and global reach while the US has wasted its strength and energy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Burke’s most significant oversight, however, is Iran, which was converted overnight into a regional superpower by George W Bush’s incomparably stupid decision to invade neighbouring Iraq.

Since that moment Iran has been at the heart of the 9/11 wars. It coordinated, financed and supplied weapons for much of the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq, and has formed an opportunistic alliance with the Taliban. Some US generals believe that the events of the past 10 years can be best explained as a series of proxy fights between Iran and the US. The absence of any serious discussion of this overarching strategic reality is a weakness in Burke’s well-written and knowledgeable book.

The former Metropolitan police officer Robert Lambert also focuses on the fight against al-Qaeda, but has written an entirely different work from Burke’s global narrative. Lambert focuses on the long struggle against al-Qaeda sympathisers in Britain, and his book is illuminating, wise and profound.

Shortly after 9/11, Lambert, a career police officer, was put in charge of the newly formed Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit and set about applying the lessons of Britain’s long war against Irish Republican terrorism. This meant that his approach was the diametric opposite of Tony Blair and George W Bush in their “war on terror”. He repudiated the “with us or against us” approach taken by these two world leaders after 9/11, soberly recording that “my training taught me that alienating the Muslim communities where al-Qaeda sought recruits would only play into the terrorists’ hands”.

This meant that Lambert simultaneously found himself working against al-Qaeda and also against the bombastic rhetoric of the Bush/Blair “war on terror”. The core of Lambert’s narrative concerns the recapture of the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London from a group of al-Qaeda-sympathising militants led by the notorious cleric Abu Hamza.

This was a dangerous and risky enterprise, but Lambert and his colleagues did not set about their task through violence and confrontation. Instead they worked with Abu Hamza’s Muslim congregation, the vast majority of whom were thoroughly disenchanted with him. It was they who – with police officers standing by in case of violence – dislodged Abu Hamza and his fanatical followers. The lesson of this story is that the Muslims who carried out this brave act were by no means the apostles of liberal democracy as envisaged by Bush and Blair. Many of them supported Hamas – itself defined by Whitehall as a terrorist group – and all were powerfully opposed to the Afghanistan and Iraq invasion.

This is what makes Lambert’s book so thought-provoking and important. He has now retired from the police and is not a popular figure in Whitehall, where his soft and intelligent counter-terrorism tactics have been dismissed in favour of David Cameron’s muscular liberalism. Ten years on from the horror and tragedy of 9/11, the lessons of the so-called “war on terror” have yet to be learnt, and this is troubling as we peer into the shapeless years that lie ahead.